Tag Archives: Limacidae

I found this one underside the mushroom in the wood in Moravia, Czech Republic:Although it is thought to be the longest land slug species, it is shrinked like this:It seemed a bit pale and especially the foot was very pale. I have taken it and taken no photo of the foot. It has great color variability, but the mantle is unicolor always and the sole has three color parts always.

I have taken photos of the same specimen 26 days later. It grow up and the three color parts of the foot are visible more clearly:

Ambigolimax valentianus is a land slug from the family Limacidae. Its native distribution includes Iberian Peninsula only, but it is spreading in many other countries as an invasive species. It can live in greenhouses and similar habitats in cold areas only. It lives in greenhouses in Central Europe too. It is a pest in greenhouses and it is able to overpopulate and then it can be a serious pest. It can reach the length up to 70 mm.

Various views of the slug:

The foot is light gray:

There exist two forms of Ambigolimax valentianus: a form with two dark lateral bands and a a spotted form. The spotted form looks like this. It looks a bit yellow on the photo, but it is caused by the sunglight.

Its eggs look like this. I found those eggs below the bowl for the potted plant.

Notice the juvenile slug in the front. It is interesting that its egss will not survive temperatures above 33 °C.

A juvenile slug:

Another photo with juvenile slugs:

This species is also known as Lehmannia valentiana. In fact I did not known, that it could be placed in the genus Ambigolimax up today.

So I searched for reasons of its generic placement:

Klee et al. found out based on molecular phylogeny research of cytochrome-c oxidase I (COI) genes, that the genus Lehmannia is diphyletic in 2005. She also repeated the information in her thesis in 2013.

Rowson et al. confirmed such placement also according to the COI genes analysis in 2014. By the way, they did not comment this species in the PLoS article anyhow. They just shown the cladogram on the figure 5.

The results are:

Lehmannia marginata (O. F. Müller, 1774) still belong to the genus Lehmannia Heynemann, 1863, because it is the type species of the genus.

Lehmannia valentiana (Férussac, 1822) belong to the genus Ambigolimax Pollonera, 1887 as a Ambigolimax valentiana (Férussac, 1822). It is the type species of the genus Ambigolimax.

Today I was mushroom hunting. One of the best findings was the death cap Amanita phalloides, that is the most poisonous fungus of the Northern Hemisphere. It is deadly poisonous for humans, but some animals, such as gastropods can eat them without any problems.

When you are mushroom hunting, yellow slug Malacolimax tenellus is one of the most common species you can find even in spruce monoculture plantings. It is strictly woodland species living in Europe. Coniferous forests are not suitable environment for many gastropods, especially for snails. Snails can not create their shells in acidic coniferous forest habitats easily. Therefore usualy only few slug speciess thrive there.

Although this time the slug has fallen down when trying to go up over the annulus, there are many markings how the fungus is damaged by this slug: on the top of the cap (not visible on these photos), on lamellae, on the stipe, the whole volva is eaten.

Gastropods are alo resistant to hallucinogenic alcaloids hyoscyamine and atropine that are available for example in mandrake plant Mandragora officinarum.

References:

(in Czech) (15 May 2011) “Peyotl, mandragora a další: Ze světa halucinogenních rostlin” Český rozhlas [Czech Radio] http://www.rozhlas.cz/planetarium/priroda/_zprava/895839 – reference about the mandrake. It would be good to have more scientific reference for the resistence to mandrake. If you know some, let me to know.